Last month, Emma Vignola graduated with a Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy. For five years, Vignola served as a doctoral fellow with the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute. Her dissertation, Investigating and Mitigating the Harmful Impact of Precarious Employment on the Health and Well-Being of New York City Food Workers, received the Dissertation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Community Health & Social Sciences. Here Nick Freudenberg, Distinguished Professor of Public Health, Co-Founder and Senior Faculty Fellow at the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute, and Chair of Vignola’s dissertation committee asks her questions about this project.  

NICK FREUDENBERG (NF): EMMA, WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO WRITE YOUR PH.D. DISSERTATION ABOUT LOW-WAGE FOOD WORKERS?

Emma Vignola (EV): I pursued a Ph.D. to learn more about the ways that work and employment quality influence health, as a way to incorporate questions of power into my public health research and practice. When thinking about a specific population to focus on for my dissertation, food workers made a lot of sense given their large numbers in the US and NYC workforce and given the many labor issues in the sector that reflect power dynamics connected to class, gender, race, ethnicity, and immigration. There were also gaps in the literature that I could help fill by studying food workers, as public health research has only recently begun to focus on employment as a social determinant of health, and food system and food justice research has until recently tended to exclude the labor that upholds the food system.

NF: WHAT DID YOU FIND WERE THE FOOD INDUSTRY PRACTICES THAT MOST THREATENED THE OVERALL WELL-BEING OF FOOD WORKERS?

EV: The workers that my colleague Luis Saavedra, a CUNY MPH student and a research associate at the Food Policy Institute, and I spoke to, were primarily in the services and processing industries. They talked about inadequate wages and/or little to no benefits, unpredictable scheduling or excessively fast-paced work environments, and imbalanced power dynamics with managers as features of their employment that harmed their well-being. These are all characteristics of what is called “precarious employment,” and they’re tied to industry practices of consolidation by a small number of companies, resistance to worker organizing, and “flexibilization”, or the use of part-time, contingent, or outsourced workers who receive only pay for their work with little job security, no benefits, or rights. Some industries (agriculture and food services) have engaged in some or all of these practices for a long time, while others (grocery and processing) used to offer better quality employment but have embraced these harmful practices more over time, in the name of maximizing profit. 

NF: FROM YOUR DISSERTATION FINDINGS, WHAT PUBLIC POLICIES DO YOU THINK WOULD BEST PROTECT LOW-WAGE FOOD WORKERS?

EV: We need public policies that hold employers to task where feasible – e.g., by increasing the minimum wage and tying it to inflation (e.g., see Raise Up NY), and ending the subminimum wage for tipped employees. Other examples are expanding eligibility for and awareness of paid sick leave, and policies that make it harder for employers to misclassify workers as independent contractors, thereby stripping workers of rights and protections. Increasing the enforceability of labor rights is also key. We also need public policies that help fill gaps in employer-based benefits and decouple vital resources from both employment and immigration status, including health insurance (e.g., see Coverage4All). Finally, we need policies that help shift the massive power imbalance between food workers and employers. An example is the federal Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would close loopholes in current labor law that allow employers to use various union-busting tactics and would help restore workers’ power to organize unions and bargain collectively.

NF: EMMA, I KNOW YOU READ A LOT TO COMPLETE YOUR DISSERTATION. FOR NEWSLETTER READERS WHO WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT FOOD INDUSTRY PRACTICES THAT HARM THE WELL-BEING OF FOOD WORKERS, WHAT ARE THE TWO OR THREE BEST SOURCES YOU RECOMMEND?

EV: To get started I suggest:

NF: DR. VIGNOLA, WHAT DO YOU PLAN TO DO NEXT ON THIS TOPIC?

EV: Ongoing projects include our shared work related to using universities and colleges as sites for organizing students working in the food sector, and work with other researchers related to understanding the impact of algorithmic management on app-based food delivery workers’ health. I also plan to continue working with colleagues on measuring the contribution of precarious employment (across various sectors) to population health inequities in the US  and investigating the potential for social policies to mitigate its harmful health effects.

About the Interviewee

Emilia (Emma) Vignola recently completed her Ph.D. in Community Health and Health Policy at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy. She has worked in the US and internationally on research related to child development, food justice, and precarious employment, and in program implementation related to health workforce training. Her current research is focused on political and social determinants of health inequities, particularly work-related health inequities.